This application generally relates to the generation of lists of prospective customers and, in particular, to the generation of highly responsive lists of prospective customers.
A successful marketing plan or marketing campaign is an important part of any business attempting to provide goods or services to consumers. To be successful, a marketing plan requires a list or lists of prospective customers that can be targeted to receive marketing material. Targeting marketing material to consumers relevant to the business, i.e. prospective customers of the business, is critical to ensuring high consumer response to the marketing material and conserving the marketing resources of the business.
Conventional methods of identifying a list or lists of prospective customers can produce poor results in terms of consumer response and can be too costly for some businesses. One common method involves the purchase of a prospect list through a list broker or directly from the source or manager of a prospect list. A prospect list typically contains a list of consumers (prospects) having at least one common attribute or characteristic. For example, the subscribers of a particular magazine may comprise a prospect list. Presently, there are over 28,000 available prospect lists. Because of the large number of available prospect lists, many list purchasers choose to work with a list broker to obtain a prospect list that includes likely consumers of the business. To be successful, the list broker must understand the business of the list purchaser, including, for example, the relevant industry, the competition, the present customers, the goods and services being sold, and how they have successfully been sold in the past. In addition, after analyzing the list purchaser, the list broker must understand the nature of the available prospect lists so as to make the proper recommendations to the list purchaser.
While manual list research may lead to finding effective and responsive prospect lists, it suffers from many drawbacks. Because of the large number of variables involved in identifying a useful prospect list, list brokers often rely on intuition to identify relevant prospect lists. As a result, two independent list brokers may identify two different prospect lists for the same list purchaser, and each list can produce dramatically different consumer responses. As the success or failure of a prospect list for each list purchaser is often not tracked, the response to a purchased prospect list is not considered during later use of the prospect list, leading to repeated and costly errors.
Yet another problem associated with manual list research is that the cost of the services is too much for many businesses. Thus, many businesses rely on prospect lists that are not specifically targeted to their potential customers. As a result, marketing material is frequently sent to consumers with a very low chance of interest. Consumers may consider such poorly targeted marketing material as “junk mail.” As most consumers typically receive a deluge of marketing material by e-mail, telephone, or mail, poorly targeted marketing material can be annoying, wasteful, and can lead to relevant or highly targeted marketing material being disregarded along with the junk.